The former OASIS star found out recently that a cunning punter in Barcelona had snapped up the domain name noelgallagher.com ten years ago.

And The Chief’s plans to get things in order for his solo career were being held up by the Barca Bandit – because he was demanding a small fortune to hand it back.

Noel took matters into his own hands last week. He paid for the Spaniard to fly to London, put him up in a plush hotel and met him in person to thunder out a deal.

And after some serious haggling, and a few Oasis anecdotes, the chancer changed his demands from tens of thousands of pounds – to some signed memorabilia and guest list action at Noel’s next solo gigs.

I’m not sure how much success Oasis ever had outside of the UK. If you’ve never heard of them: briefly here in the 1990s they were regarded by some (mainly themselves) as the second coming of The Beatles.

I’ve never before seen a domain name story reported in The Sun, a notoriously unreliable but hugely popular Murdoch-owned daily rag, so I did a bit of fact-checking.

Whois history shows that the original registrant was from Madrid, not Barcelona, and that the domain was initially registered in 2002.

While the report claims Gallagher flew the squattter to London to negotiate the deal “last week”, the domain actually seems to have been owned by someone at Oasis’s record label since March 2010.

So either the cybersquatter got a free city break, or The Sun is — shockingly — reporting unreliable celebrity news.

The domain name twitter.co.uk, which was until recently listed for sale with a £30,000 ($47,000) price tag, is now owned by Twitter.

The domain now redirects visitors to twitter.com, and Whois records last updated a week ago show that it is now registered to the San Francisco-based company.

Until recently, twitter.co.uk led to a page calling itself a “thorn in the side of American imperialism” and containing a lengthy rant about the microblogging service, which The Guardian reported on in 2009.

It also, since April 2010, carried this notice:

This domain is for sale at offers over £30k. This valuation is based on the fact that I devoted 9 months of my life working on my own t.w.i.t.t.e.r. project in 2005. I have offered the domain to Twitter Inc, giving them “first refusal”, and as they turned me down I am now offering it to anyone else who may be interested. Obviously there are limits as to what you would be allowed to do with the domain and you should familiarise yourself with Nominet’s policies and, in particular, its Dispute Resolution Service (DRS)

The previous owner registered the domain in early 2005 for his own legitmate purposes, well before Twitter itself launched, so it was by no means a case of cybersquatting.

The domain would, of course, have been considered untouchable for any sensible domainer.

Nominet, the .uk registry, currently has no record of Twitter ever bringing a complaint to its DRS, so it seems likely that Twitter had to put its hand in its pocket to acquire the domain.

Did Microsoft just file a UDRP complaint on a typo of a domain name it doesn’t even own?

When Microsoft announced its new Kinect games console earlier this year, it did so without owning the domain kinect.com, as I blogged at the time.

But this week somebody – I’m guessing Microsoft – has filed UDRP on the typo wwwkinect.com, which was registered about the same time as the console launched and is currently parked.

The complainant’s name doesn’t seem to be available yet, but the case was filed the same day as several other Kinect-related UDRP cases that almost certainly are Microsoft’s work, such as microsoftkinect.com.

Kinect.com currently belongs to an advertising agency called CAHG. The domain isn’t resolving (for me) at the moment, which makes me wonder if it’s in the process of changing hands.

It would certainly be unusual for the company to own a typo of somebody else’s domain, although I don’t think there’s anything in the UDRP rules that would prevent it winning the case.

UDRP, after all, only compares contested domains against owned trademarks, not domain portfolios.

While Microsoft would not have a leg to stand on if it filed UDRP against the non-typo domain, I expect a good case could be made that the large majority of people typing “kinect.com” into their browsers are looking for Microsoft’s console.

Alexa is showing that kinect.com has experienced a 350% increase in traffic over the last three months, and has increased its Alexa rank by almost two million places.

The scandal-hit Russian domain name market may yet produce some of the most expensive domain name sales of all time. Premium .рф generics are already attracting eight-figure bids.

Bids of $10 million have apparently been placed on at least two domains, квартиры.рф and бетон.рф (apartments.rf and concrete.rf), in the controversial quasi-landrush auction managed by RU-Center, the largest Russian registrar.

IDNblog.com is reporting the apartments.rf asking price, and a reader was kind enough to send me a screenshot of the concrete.rf auction.

If these bids are for real, and these auctions were to close, they would immediately occupy the number two and three slots on the league table of all-time biggest-ticket domain sales

Before sex.com sold for $13 million, DNJournal’s top twenty list had fund.com in the top spot, at $9,999,950, followed by porn.com at $9,500,000 and diamond.com at $7,500,000.

The RU-Center auctions may not close, however.

As I reported yesterday, the registrar and five others are being investigated on antitrust grounds by Russian competition authorities, after allegedly registering tens of thousands of domains to themselves.

The auctions are currently frozen and the .рф registry, Coordination Center for ccTLD, has made noises about applying “sanctions” to the registrars that could include de-accreditation.

RU-Center, which confusingly does business at nic.ru, has defended its position in at least two articles here and here (in Russian, naturally).

As far as I can tell, none of these auctions will close until the registrar and the registry resolve their differences and/or the Russian government probe concludes.

However, it’s pretty obvious that the demand for Cyrillic generic IDNs is enormous in Russia, and could easily challenge .com on the big-sale league tables.

While it’s well known that o.com is the ultimate prize, Overstock has also been laying the groundwork for buying o.co.uk for over three years.

Nominet, the .uk registry, is set to open up the first of two sunrise periods on double and single-character .co.uk domains on December 1, and I expect Overstock already has its application ready to go.

It might not be an entirely straightforward bid, however.

Under the Nominet sunrise rules, holders of UK trademarks in use before January 1, 2008 are eligible to apply for their short domains.